


See What Happens

by kalijean, SLWalker



Series: Arch to the Sky [82]
Category: due South
Genre: Arch to the Sky, Chicago (1998), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-25
Updated: 2011-10-25
Packaged: 2017-10-24 23:04:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/268879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalijean/pseuds/kalijean, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>November 1998: Guy goes back to say goodbye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	See What Happens

_Guy Laurent rolled over and then promptly tried to climb his wall._

_There was a man in his bed._

_There was the scent of burnt flesh in the air._

_There was a_ man in his bed, naked, with a brand upon his ass _._

_"Uhn," the man said._

_"Que? Que veux-tu?!"_

_"God, my ass hurts."_

_"What?!"_

 

 

The truck was beat up with shit suspension, and hitching all the way here made Guy Laurent's back ache.

His ass was numb but he tipped his thanks to the driver anyway, hefting his road-battered pack on his shoulder. He pushed his equally battered sunglasses further up his nose, sighed out, and made his way into town on foot. Dry leaves skidded past his feet on a breeze, and up above, the wispy clouds barely muted the bright sunlight. The air was musty, like fall; it transported him a thousand miles, a thousand places, before dropping him back on the double yellow line in the road to find his way by foot.

Guy didn't mind walking. Easier to smell the town once the vague smell of gas covered rags had driven off. It didn't look like it had changed much. Still had a big sky. Still felt like the kind of place made out of the comfortable ass-dent in a well-worn couch. He wondered if the residents would still see him coming and hide their daughters. He wondered if the scorch marks were still visible in certain places. He wondered many things.

He wondered if they would remember. If they had forgotten.

The last of the strangest curling rink Nipawin had ever seen was coming back again.

Guy never thought much on loss. Well. Yes, so he _did_ , he just didn't think there was any point in thinking much about loss. Missing something was missing something. Do something about it or don't. Life wasn't static, nothing really stayed, but things _did_ have a way of coming around. It was a pattern he had observed and lived in; a universal fact. What you lose. What you find. What comes around to meet you again. What you have to leave behind.

The pins-and-needles in his ass had long faded, but his feet were starting to ache when he slipped in the door of the old bar.

It had not changed.

Same old curling tapes. Same old bartender. Same old beer.

But nothing was really the same anymore, and Guy found it somehow _annoying_ that the bar had not marked that fact.

The place was empty. His mood projected four seats at a table by the window and two people that should've been there.

The bartender never said why the first one was free, tonight, but they both knew.

Guy slammed it back and tried to resolve himself to one thing at a time.

 

_The man's name was Andrew Longfellow, and he had no understandable reason why he was in Guy's dorm room at the Université de Montréal. Nor did he know why he had a brand upon his ass, nor did he remember how he got there. Guy tried to drag him from the room in time for him to get to his first class of the day and found the man incapable of moving. It was with great anxiety he simply left the man there, laying on his narrow bed, and he spent most of his first class worrying about it._

_But the man had not ransacked the room while he was gone, and when Guy came back, affronted and more than slightly concerned for his many -- and sometimes expensive -- possessions, the man was sitting on his bed, still naked, with bleary blue eyes and wild straw-colored hair and a slightly crooked grin._

_"Get_ out _," Guy said, without preamble._

 _The man looked a little surprised and hurt, then shrugged and crawled to his feet, wincing. Guy mostly averted his eyes, but he did not miss the bruises, many of them livid and angry-looking, or the raw knuckles, and he did not miss the even more angry looking 'brand' upon the man's ass, which appeared to be a crudely burned in initial of_ something _done with a red hot poker._

_However, he was not the patron saint of... whatever this Andrew Longfellow was, and said nothing, not even when the man almost collapsed upon the floor._

_He did not understand why it bothered him for the rest of the day, until Longfellow appeared the next morning with gas station coffee in a styrofoam cup, offering it like a child would offer their mother bashed wildflowers in dirty hands._

 

 

Longfellow would've wanted it this way.

Guy was sure of it.

Andrew was undeniably dead. Guy had seen him smashed out of his mind, passed out on a number of bizarre surfaces that between the pair of them had driven a number of people to maddened distraction trying to figure out the physics of just how the Hell they'd gotten _up there_. This wasn't passed out. Longfellow wasn't playing an elaborate joke on him or desecrating someone's funeral by misappropriating a casket.

Again.

No. Andrew Longfellow was as dead as Guy's old man.

And immeasurably more missed.

Even Guy Laurent was forced to suppress a tear at that, though it was hidden by pot-leaf sunglasses and his head ducked over the body. A man had to be sure, after all. Wouldn't do to go burning a friend alive by accident. Would've ruined two perfectly good stunts in one fell swoop.

The funeral home was nearly empty. Longfellow didn't really have any family left. There were a few people in attendance; he couldn’t fathom why. And God knew who paid for the service. But it was quiet enough. A pastor. A few old women fingering the flower displays -- probably to take them as soon as the calling hours were over, he reflected -- and the funeral home's director, who looked decidedly bored. Guy only noted them peripherally, before turning his regard back to Longfellow. He was impressed with how well they'd covered the bruises.

He was surprised at how peaceful Longfellow looked.

It was a wonderful piece of fictional bullshit.

He wanted to wipe it off and let the man be in death exactly what he was in life. He wanted the waxy makeup _gone_. He wanted the truth of it; the real peace that happened on rare quiet nights when they were worn out on shenanigans and had little more than a bottle or a joint and the comfort of understanding.

Not this. No, if Drew was to be in a casket, then he should at least be wearing the marks that had put him there. Drew never got into a fight in half-measures, not even when he was hopelessly outnumbered and keeping back five guys with sheer projected attitude and sometimes a chair. Guy wasn't terribly surprised that had been what killed him, though if he'd known about that aneurysm lurking in the guy's brain, Guy would've taken more care not to knock the man into the fray himself over the years.

If only attitude had been enough to keep back death. Somebody could've provided the chair.

Guy slipped the Pepsi bottle full of accelerant from his inner pocket, leaning over the casket and pouring a generous amount, flicking back and forth to get some distance without being overt as to what he was doing. Better to the flames, than to the fiction.

He tossed the bottle beside his friend and gave him a two-fingered salute.

"Au revoir, mon ami," he whispered, flicking open his very best zippo - pot leaf enameled on the front - and stepping back.

The casket, pretty satin lining and all, went up in a glorious _whoosh_ when he tossed it in. Someone in the pews shrieked.

Guy shoved his glasses up into his hair.

The flames of a now-closed chapter of his life warmed his face for a golden moment before he felt himself tackled to the ground.

 

_The days were often the same. Guy had many friends, and they spent a great deal of time in finery and comfort. Guy was not stupid, though, and he didn't fail to notice that he was the one who paid for the most of that finery and comfort; that there was always some excuse from the others about why they could not pay for it themselves. He didn't fail to notice that women seemed far more interested in his car than in him, and that the people he knew now were so very different than the people he had grown up knowing._

_Guy was smart. Exceptionally so; he was only twenty one and close to his master's degree. Therefore, it came as a blow to his ego and his heart both when he realized how_ wrong _about everything he was._

 _Longfellow still hung around. He did not ask for anything, and seemed to be in a perpetual state of apology for that initial meeting, long after Guy started looking forward to the man's company. The first time Longfellow had provoked a bar fight had been a rush and a shock, both. The first time Guy dragged his... his, yes, _friend_ through the back door before the police could catch them had been terrifying and exciting. It was the first time, since he had received the inheritance, that he felt truly _ alive _._

_Little by little, Guy dropped his pretenses._

_Little by little, his 'friends' dropped him._

_"Relax. Just see what happens," Longfellow said, shrugging under his oversized overcoat, rain pouring down on them both as they stood on the side of the highway with nothing but the clothes upon their backs and two packs, one of which was new._

 

 

"Oh, I remember _you_."

Guy had just finished bending his glasses back into shape and sliding them on again when he heard that from the cell door. He smirked, looking over the glasses at Mike Chase before nudging them the rest of the way up his nose. Hm. _Sergeant_ Mike Chase, apparently, these days. The man did not look very different, unless one counted more gray hair, and perhaps a deeper furrow between his eyebrows.

"Hey."

"All this time, a flaming body and a dogpile tackle at a _funeral_ , and that's all you have to say?" Chase chuckled, wearily, shaking his head.

Guy shrugged, still smirking. There was plenty to say, but none of it aloud.

"What the heck were you _doing_ , anyway? I'd say that was a nasty trick you pulled, but knowing you two, I'm guessing that was his last wish or something."

Toasting an imaginary drink, Guy made a noise of satisfaction with himself.

"Uh-huh. He was going to be cremated anyway. You two and fire. Oh, yeah. I definitely remember you." Chase's expression went through a number of things, one of which actually did give Guy pause -- a suspicion that he would not expect -- but after a moment of almost hawkish scrutiny, that expression softened. "Turnbull's friend?"

Guy's grin went sadly lopsided; it had been fake anyway, and the inclination to hold it slipped under that. He nodded slowly. Chase knew that; had not forgotten that. But Guy wasn't going to dash his segue upon the ground.

Silence hung for a little while, Chase leaning against the cell, examining a space of floor very carefully. It must have felt awkward on Chase's part. Guy was never awkward, but he would have preferred the solitude. He was on the point of asking if the man had been in love with him, because the look on Chase's face resembled his own by the fifth shot on a bad night when someone reminded him of Jeanne.

That was when Chase asked quietly, "You ever hear from him? Know how he’s doing?"

"No," Guy replied simply.

"Oh." Chase looked off, to someplace that was quite clearly beyond these walls.

"Been planning to go visit him soon, though." In truth, Guy hadn't been directly planning to do that at all. It was a whim born right here, right now, but that was pretty much how Guy lived his life. Things came around. Longfellow never would again, and it lent Guy the kind of mood to chase a nostalgic impulse. Chicago could be a trip, and besides, Guy had planned to mock Turnbull for that little dance through politics Guy heard about.

Hit by a _bus_. Fuck.

He was lucky he hadn't lost two in the same year.

"Oh, yeah?" Chase's eyebrows went up and he looked back at Guy, wryly amused. "You say that like we're not going to throw the book at you."

Guy tipped Chase a two-fingered salute, slow and easy.

"I could, you know." He pointed. "Arson, desecration of a body..."

"Come on. You don't want that much paperwork." Guy waggled all five fingers in a wave, his look all innocence and sugar. "I'm the old detachment mascot, come back to give a friend a Viking funeral. Reunion, old times, nostalgia and such. You wouldn't do that, would you?"

"I should make an example of you, Laurent." Chase rolled his eyes, chuckling, though the sound did not seem to be all that mirthful. "All the havoc you've wreaked in this town over the years. You're lucky the sprinklers kept the damage down, and Longfellow didn't have any family to raise Hell about it." He eyed Guy for a beat, looking thoughtful. "All right. I'll make you a deal."

"I am all ears, Monsieur."

"I won't charge you with anything that'll get you bounced at the border if you pay for the damages and promise to take something to him for me."

 _What the fuck am I, a delivery boy?_ It was a good deal. Well. As long as the 'something' didn't have to be smuggled in his ass, but he didn't take Chase for someone to make such a request. They might have been much better friends when Guy lived in Nipawin if he had been.

"I can do that."

"Good." Chase pointed again. "Don’t combust anything else in my town before you go. It's not like I can't mail the thing, and nobody here's missed the scorch marks and the mountain of paperwork you leave behind, okay?"

Giving his best winning smile, Guy tipped a long look over his glasses.

Chase snorted and left him to sit for a while.

 

_Guy had grown up in a world not unlike Longfellow's; the biggest difference was that his mother worked and his father did not beat him to within an inch of his life, merely vanished without a trace one spring day. Losing the upper-class felt like coming home; thumbing their way from place to place felt right. He did try to temper Drew's tendency to provoke people, though he had eventually reached a point where he realized there was little he could do besides mitigate. And for the first year, they lived off of odd-jobs and dumpsters, and Guy did not touch the money he had inherited. His mother was cared for already. He, himself, would survive with what he had upon his back._

_The first time he did touch the money again was to rent them a place in Sarnia, Ontario, after Drew had been too badly beaten to walk so that he could have time to recover. They ended up staying there for a number of months, making friends in quite unlikely places, and spending a great deal of time stoned._

_One night, when there was a thunderstorm that came down upon Sarnia like a hurricane, something in Drew snapped and Guy found himself listening to the raging, bleeding anger of a man who had spent most of his childhood ducking fists and most of his adulthood throwing them, until there was nothing left but the sound of ragged sobs._

_Drew vanished the next day, leaving behind no note or good-bye, just a cup of cheap coffee in styrofoam._

 

 

True enough, Chase was good for his word. Guy was not surprised by that.

Of course, the owner of the funeral home should have more properly been brought up on charges of extortion, considering what he wanted in return for allowing the matter to slip quietly from view. The so-called damages were outlandish. Further, Guy paid for Longfellow's proper cremation and the rest of the services rendered, including that truly awful makeup (it was insulting that Drew was painted to look like the monstrosity he had tormented Guy with; that visage belonged only on something charred and probably still nailed to that wall) before he was free to go.

Well. At least he would be in receipt of the ashes, and considering that he was walking away without charges, Guy supposed that it truly was a fair trade.

After weaving his way through the detachment in easy familiarity -- to the shock of a couple of baby-faced Mounties -- he knocked quietly on Chase's office door.

Chase looked up from his desk and stood. "Laurent."

"Sir," Guy answered, with just enough of a drawl to give it a mocking flavor without outright mocking Chase himself.

Chase rolled his eyes again, then got into his desk. Guy took a moment to look around the office, though he didn't take his chances and wander. It seemed Nipawin was busy. File folders everywhere. And on the wall, there was a map of the region, including Nipawin, with tacked notes on it, each with a date and time.

"Here."

Guy looked back, and...

_Oh._

They stood in silence for a very long moment, before Guy carefully reached out and took the little model of the blue-and-white Chevy Caprice. Battered. Paint-chipped. But the numbers on the quarter panels were still crisp, and something in Guy's chest tightened even to look at it.

"Get out of here," Chase said, quietly.

For one of the very few times in his life, Guy Laurent was at a loss for words that he did want to be able to say. He looked up for a moment, opening his mouth for only a second before the look on Chase's face made him close it again.

He left without another word.

 

_Guy's finding of himself was not an instant transformation. It was gradual; a dawning discovery of what it meant to be alive. Losing Drew was the first moment he found his true calm._

_Drew had been reckless pain._

_Jeanne was reckless joy._

_He had never before, and never since, been so in love as he was then. She was wild, broken dreams in Manitoba, and lived every moment as though it were her last. Guy lived every moment with her, and when they collapsed into her bed and he held her, he felt himself soar._

_But never so high as she did. She soared out of his arms, and left him on the ground. He did not remember much of the months that followed, with his eyes turned to the sky and his heart in his shoes._

 

It happened that yes, some of the scorch marks were still visible.

He hopped into his old window like he'd never left the place, confident that it was unoccupied but prepared for a surprise anyway. It was empty. Dirtier, smelling of emptiness with the faint leftovers of other people. He slung his pack onto the kitchen counter; coming in through this window always necessitated landing in the sink, and he found he was sitting in someone's old broken dishes.

When he hit the floor he moved off to explore whatever wayward tenants had done to his old place.

It looked like someone had left it open to the elements at some point. There were holes in the ceiling. One of the windows in the back were smashed. His hopes of George's head remaining nailed to the wall were disappointed; the old head was in several pieces on the floor. He picked up what he could and carried it back to the living room.

The same old couch sat there. A little more scorched, a little more faded, but he could make out his old dent on one side. He scattered George across the coffee table and flopped on the couch, vaguely annoyed by the absence of his old TV.

He crossed his feet where Drew used to sit.

 

_Drew sat beside of him in Vancouver, as though he had never gone, and Guy shoved him hard in the head. Drew shook it off and leaned back in against his shoulder for the barest moment, before offering him a bag of truly awful skunk._

_Drew was reckless pain. Guy was reckless calm._

_He had made true friends over the years. Friends who would put them up, would pick them up. All across Canada, a drifting network of the dregs of society; it was not hard to distill his network down to those he could trust. Those who would rob him blind were left without warning, and those who would stand at his back remained. And over the years, Drew drifted in and out of his life, but he was always a presence. A bonspiel won. A night camping in forests. A wild party on a highrise roof. A quiet moment riding in the bed of a pickup. Guy stopped asking questions and accepted the flow of the universe, in its beauty, and let himself follow it wherever it decided to take him. Sometimes it took him and Drew different places, but that was inevitably all right: They would find each other down the road._

_It was no surprise, really, when his wanderings took him to Regina. Despite his lifestyle, he had never been arrested and it was his own attitude towards the universe that allowed him to pass the polygraph with flying colors. The RCMP likely had never had a recruit such as Guy Laurent, and they didn't even know it. When he got bored and dropped out, it was no great loss to him, but as he hung around Regina and heard the rumors of other recruits and later the more disturbing bragging, he still regretted not staying. Therefore, it made perfect sense to follow Renfield Turnbull to Nipawin._

_And when Drew settled next to him on his couch, a piece seemed to fall into the puzzle of Nipawin, and it was as it seemed to have always been._

_It was the first time Guy had ever truly called for the man, rather than allowing the winds of the world to see to them, and even then it had taken months for Drew to drift his way. They didn't speak, only sat shoulder to shoulder. Greeting came in the form of the back of Drew's hand passed over his own, and he handed over the spliff in answer._

_Smoke curled above their heads, stirred and taken by the remaining blades of the slow-turning ceiling fan, on in the winter simply because it was._

 

 

He had to wait a number of days for Longfellow's ashes to come into his possession, as well as the urn he commissioned from an old friend.

The library held memories in print. There was an article about that festival one year. Copies of articles about the various police reports of their various shenanigans. Pictures of the bonspiel, where they had taken second place; a picture of their rink. Guy, grinning lazily at the camera. Longfellow scowling -- the picture did not show that Guy was holding him by the back of his jacket to pose for the picture. Mark, their talented asshole skip, perfectly comfortable. Renfield, looking abashed at having his photo in the paper -- the caption identified him as Constable Turnbull.

An article about the girl that Renfield had found in the regional park, after she had wandered away from her parents and gotten lost in a thunderstorm. An article about another bonspiel, this one where they barely qualified to get their names into the paper.

All just memories, in black and newsprint, but Guy chased the nostalgic impulse for lack of anything better to do.

One article caught his eye by accident; a picture of the Nipawin bridge ran alongside it.

When Guy walked back to his old place, he passed by a police cruiser, sitting in the dark. Mike Chase sat in the driver's seat, dark eyes watching the road where it became nothing but blackness, and Guy wondered if he would find what it was he was waiting for.

 

_Sitting on the water tower, it rained on them. It ruined Drew's cigarette, and they watched the cherry wink out as it fell to the ground._

_Something was wrong, they both knew it. It sat between them, not theirs, but on them all the same. There was nothing to say. No words for it._

_Guy absently bumped the back of Drew's hand. Drew gestured down at the grass where the rollup lay sodden, and Guy huffed a breath out._

_When the Mountie left, life seemed to still._

_Guy lingered in the town for a little while, as though the answer might fall with the rain of another storm if only he was there to catch it. They both felt the restlessness. Both knew they'd drift again, together, apart, because something seemed to have bled out of this place with the impossibility of an answer._

_It was Drew that slipped away. No words. One night he straightened Guy's glasses, pressing them back into his face by the bridge, and the next morning he had gone, leaving a pot of coffee still hot but gone stale in the kitchen._

_Nipawin left Guy not long after._

_They would find each other down the road. Guy wandered, straying as far as he could before drifting back, slowly and inexorably. He found his stride again, as well as it could be found; managed to find calm and peace again, on threadbare sheets or in soft-skinned arms with his head upon a woman's breast. He drifted back in the direction of Nipawin, though, because he wanted to put it to rest and the only way to do that was to go back, perhaps for the last time._

_But Drew had gotten there first, and Guy was too late to say the goodbye he would have said if he had known._

 

The miles hummed under the tires, and Guy contented himself with listening to the quiet talking of a group of strangers shoved into a Greyhound like so many sardines. There was nothing new to him about the scent of travelers; slightly rank, tired, ground into clothes and skin in a world where the climate was never quite right for anyone. He simply accepted it as familiar. Comfortable, even.

Longfellow's ashes were in an urn in his bag, a hand-thrown clay thing with a crude curling motif, wrapped in Guy's t-shirts in order to protect it. It wouldn't do to have Longfellow end up spending his eternity in the grooves of the center aisle of Bus 5230.

Well. Perhaps it would. But not now.

Guy leaned his head against the window, looking out.

He had not seen Quebec in a long time. The longest he had ever settled upon reaching adulthood was that little town in Saskatchewan. Guy would never call it home. He had no true home, nor wanted one. But his years there had been good ones, and sometimes when he woke at night in whatever town or city he had landed, he thought that he could _smell_ it, some phantom of his senses reminding him that it truly _had_ been good.

Maybe Longfellow had gone back for the same reasons Guy had been drifting there; to say goodbye. Maybe he had gone back because he thought Guy would be there, and that then they would continue down the road together.

He closed his eyes and patted his rucksack, where Longfellow's urn kept him company.


End file.
